


Three Times Remus Lupin Didn't Cry (and one time he did)

by imochan



Series: Three Times Prompt Challenge (Tumblr) [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, But mostly angst, M/M, MWPP, Marauders, some laughter, spans multiple eras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 05:32:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3345374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For <a href="bearwonder.tumblr.com">bearwonder</a>, who asked for "Three Times Remus Lupin Didn't Cry," for the "Three Times" prompt challenge on Tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Times Remus Lupin Didn't Cry (and one time he did)

**1.**

He didn’t when he was bitten. It  _hurt_ , worse than the time he’d dropped a book on his toe or when he fell from the lowest branch of the oak tree in the back garden. It hurt like something was trying to make him  _give up –_ he could feel it circulating inside him like the pulse of a squeezed vein, radiating like heat from his ribs and sending little stabs of pain along his legs, but he didn’t cry. The fear and strangeness of it all, it kept him too still.

In the wing of St Mungo’s, bustling with white-capped witches, plummy and sour with potion-smells, and the noise of wheels and people and voices and horns and bells, all scraping up against one another in the London outside the window, it was worse. It was worse, even, than the night that it happened, because his parents were red and raw in the eyes, his da’s hands in his hair, his knuckles white, and his mum with a look on her face like she’d misplaced something precious, but hadn’t any idea where to start looking for it.

It wouldn’t do any good, he realized, to cry. Not now, when there was so much else to do. Not when everyone else was being so brave, not when he knew he had to be brave, too. What on earth would be the use in crying, he realized, when this was the worst it could ever possibly get?

 

**2.**

And not when he found out, after  _months_  of thinking that they had it out for him, that they’d had enough, that they’d figured out the depth of the mistake they’d made in first year even  _considering_ having him along for a friend, that — that it wasn’t that at all. That instead they’d been working, in secret, beyond their years, to  _help_ him. He didn’t cry then, either.

_What_ , he managed, when they changed back – and he could still feel the thick, heavy ruff of the black dog’s fur against his palm, and his heart was still beating like the wings of a panicked bird.  _How did you —_

And he hadn’t started crying, he  _hadn’t_. And James might have rubbed his hair and called him a girl, and Peter might have been laughing, whooping, shouting into the cold air, and Sirius might taken both his hands and wiped his palms across Remus’s hot, red cheeks with a flourish, cupping his face and looking at him with that very particular brand of false modesty as he said, “ _Moony, god,_ stop it _, we get it, you’re very impressed_ ,” but it wasn’t that he was crying, he  _wasn’t_  – and it didn’t count, anyway, even if he were, because he wasn’t sad.

 

**3.**

Not on Halloween, either. When it happens, he is away. He learns from a flash of  _Prophet_  headline two days later, finally shuffling into a small Northern town in the cold autumn rain, wet leaves plastering the cobblestones, hunger in his belly and aches in his spine (from the moon, from the long days pretending, from missing everyone, from the looking forward to finally going home), and in the window of the local, the curling edge of newspaper and the words:  _SIRIUS BLACK: CAPTURED, TO BE SENTENCED._

He Apparates home to London, to his cold and empty flat, with the  _Prophet_ pages clenched in his fist, and he reads the same six articles fourteen times right there in the middle of his living room, dripping on the threadbare carpet.

From this moment on, he will do many things: he will owl Albus Dumbledore and Alastor Moody and Frank Longbottom, and he will set about waiting for replies. He will make tea. He will sit on the floor of his bedroom for three-quarters of an hour and look at the dirt collected under his nails and in the creases of his palms. He will take ten very slow and deliberate breaths, one after the other. He will think about James Potter and have to go vomit in the kitchen sink. And he will be wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve and realize that he will have to think about the future, and so he will make several lists of things that need to be done, and then immediately burn them all on the stovetop burner, one by one.

No one left now to be brave for, he will think, with the back of his eyes prickling and the smell of burnt paper singeing the air. But then again, he will think, what would be the point in crying, when this — _this_  — was the worst it could possibly get?

 

**4.**

“Hallo,” he says, when he opens the door.

“Expecting me, were you?” Sirius looks  _horrible_. Even thinner and grayer than before, if it were possible, but the desperate hunger looks bled from his face; his smile, when he shrugs past him in the snug doorway and into the small corridor, is a thing of true gratitude.

“Albus sent an owl,” he says, when they are in the kitchen. He spoons out a bowl of soup — he won’t admit he’s been warming a pot every evening for the past three days, just in case. “Hungry?”

“Good  _lord_ , I thought you’d never ask,” Sirius grabs at it with both hands, goes in without need of a spoon, right there in the middle of his miserable, cramped little kitchen, with the single naked lightbulb and the mismatched borrowed crockery, and the single wooden chair for a lonely, worn-out old werewolf who has suddenly been given too much hope, and all at once, for an ordinary evening in June.

“I’ve got some things.” (He feels  _awkward_ , why on earth does he feel  _awkward_?) “I mean, upstairs – I can run a bath — you can have a wash, get changed.”

“You think I need a  _wash_?” slurps Sirius, sarcastically, and grins at him over the edge of the bowl.

And so he goes upstairs and runs the bath, testing the water with the tips of his fingers. And he sits on the edge of the old, yellowed tub, and thinks about the fact that Sirius Black is in his kitchen – alive and free and innocent, ancient-boned and saddened with the world, just like him. And he thinks about the fact that someone, miraculously, has decided to grant them  _time_.

For so long, he used to think about what it would have been like to have just one more hour, one more minute to have been able to say what it meant, what he had fel _t_ , what it was to him to be  _loved_ like that, even only for the time they had had – and he sits now on the edge of a bathtub in a crumbling cottage in Wales, and he realizes, someone has given him that. Sirius Black, back from betrayal, back from good-as-dead, is in his  _kitchen_.

“Oi, what’s this?” says Sirius, from the bathroom doorway, ragged bit of shirt already pulled over his head and gathered in his hands, his eyes a little edged with wariness. “You  _are_  a grown man, you know. None of that blubbering.”

“Oh, shut up,” he says. And this time it counts, because he is laughing, despite it all.

 


End file.
